When I was getting ready to join Kickstarter as VP of Engineering, Chad Dickerson (who was the CEO of Etsy when I worked there) offered to send me a bunch of advice. Chad had been a CTO multiple times before being CEO; he knew that this executive-level role was brand new to me, so he offered to help give me a steer and a foundation as I walked into this totally new territory.

When Bran Ferren was just 9, his parents took him to see the Pantheon in Rome — and it changed everything. In that moment, he began to understand how the tools of science and engineering become more powerful when combined with art, with design and beauty. Ever since, he's been searching for a convincing modern-day equivalent to Rome's masterpiece. Stay tuned to the end of the talk for his unexpected suggestion.

As a young, ambitious developer with a strong sense of my own talent, I was eager to become a tech lead, and it took less than four years for me to achieve this goal. But over the next two years, the experience and reality of leading a team put me off leadership completely. For several years after, I retreated into the security of the technology, shunning any opportunity to take on more responsibility.

The microservice architecture is still the most popular architectural style for distributed systems. But Kubernetes and the cloud native movement have redefined certain aspects of application design and development at scale. Modern developers must be fluent in a programming language to implement the business functionality, and equally fluent in cloud native technologies.

We have recently completed a milestone where we were able to drop jQuery as a dependency of the frontend code for GitHub.com. This marks the end of a gradual, years-long transition of increasingly decoupling from jQuery until we were able to completely remove the library. In this post, we will explain a bit of history of how we started depending on jQuery in the first place, how we realized when it was no longer needed, and point out that—instead of replacing it with another library ...